Introducing Vagrant

Have you ever heard the following?
"Welcome to the team! Here's a list of 15 applications to install,
the instructions are in the team room, somewhere. See you in a
week!" Or:
"What do you mean it broke production, it runs fine on
my
machine?" Or:
"Why is this working on her machine and his machine, but not my
machine?"

Development environments are becoming more complex, with more moving parts
and tricky dependencies.
Virtualization has been a huge boon for the IT industry in saving costs,
increasing flexibility and maintaining control over complex environments.
Rather than focusing on virtualization on the delivery side, let's look at how
you can provide that flexibility and control to developers to manage
multiple development environments easily using Vagrant.

What Is Vagrant?

Vagrant is an open-source (MIT) tool for building and managing virtualized
development environments developed by Mitchell Hashimoto and John Bender.
Vagrant manages virtual machines hosted in Oracle VirtualBox, a full x86
virtualizer that is also open source (GPLv2).

A virtual machine is a software implementation of a computer, running
a complete operating system stack on a virtualizer. It is a full
implementation of a computer with a virtual disk, memory and CPU. The
machine running the virtualizer is the Host system. The virtual machine
running on the virtualizer is the Guest system. As far as the Guest
operating system is concerned, it is running on real hardware. From the
perspective of the Host, all of the Guest's resources are used by the
virtualizer program. A Box, or base image, is the prepackaged virtual
machine that Vagrant will manage.

Installing Vagrant

Starting in version 1.0, Vagrant provides two installation methods:
packaged installers for supported platforms or a universal install with
Ruby Gems. This article covers installation using Gems. This method has
three parts: 1) install VirtualBox, 2) install Ruby and 3) install Vagrant
itself.

VirtualBox is available from the VirtualBox home page with builds for Windows,
OS X, Linux and Solaris. Note that Oracle provides the Oracle VM VirtualBox
Extension Pack on the Download site that provides additional features to
the virtualizer. The Extension Pack has a separate license (Personal Use
and Evaluation License) and is not needed to use Vagrant, but if the
Box you are using was created using the Extension Pack, you will need to
install the Extension Pack as well.

Ruby is a popular dynamically typed object-oriented scripting language.
Ruby is available out of the box in OS X, and most Linux distributions also
have a Ruby package available. For Windows users, the RubyInstaller Project
provides an easy way to install the Ruby runtime.

Ruby libraries and applications are available in packages called RubyGems
or Gems. Ruby comes with a package management tool called gem. To
install Vagrant, run the gem command:

> gem install vagrant

Vagrant is a command-line tool. Calling vagrant without additional
arguments will provide the list of available arguments. I'll visit most of
these commands within this article, but here's a quick overview:

init — create the base configuration file.

up — start a new instance of the virtual machine.

suspend — suspend the running guest.

halt — stop the running guest, similar to hitting the power button on a
real machine.

resume — restart the suspended guest.

reload — reboot the guest.

status — determine the status of vagrant for the current Vagrantfile.

provision — run the provisioning commands.

destroy — remove the current instance of the guest, delete the virtual
disk and associated files.

box — the set of commands used to add, list, remove or repackage box
files.

package — used for the creation of new box files.

ssh — ssh to a running guest.

The last thing you need to do in your installation is set up a base image. A
Box, or base image, is the prepackaged virtual machine that Vagrant will
manage. Use the box command to add the Box to your environment.
The vagrant box add command takes two arguments, the
name you use to refer to the Box and
the location of the Box:

> vagrant box add lucid32 http://files.vagrantup.com/lucid32.box

This command adds a new Box to the system called "lucid32" from a remotely
hosted site over HTTP. Vagrant also will allow you to install a Box from
the local filesystem:

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